Henry Kissinger and Robert Mugabe

The Forgotten Connection via Remarkably Creative Negotiation

February 28, 2018

When
Robert Mugabe was recently forced out of office after 37 years of increasingly
brutal rule in Zimbabwe, he had been in the job so long that few recall how he
got there. Fewer still remember that it was Henry Kissinger, of all people,
whose negotiations to achieve black majority rule in Rhodesia, later Zimbabwe,
helped to facilitate Mugabe’s ascent.

President Gerald Ford and Secretary of
State Kissinger judged 1975 to be a pivotal moment as a new front in the Cold
War threatened to open up in the mineral rich nations of Southern Africa. In 1974, a left-wing coup in Portugal spurred the demise of its colonial domination of Mozambique, where an
indigenous Marxist group rapidly gained power. Almost concurrently, an
insurgent group in Angola quickly expanded it influence
with significant Soviet military aid and what would ultimately amount to some
twenty thousand Cuban combat troops. Through Washington’s Cold War lens, two
important coastal nations in Southern Africa, Angola on the west coast and
Mozambique on the east, were fast falling under Soviet and Cuban influence.

A Soviet-sponsored Cuban alliance with
African Marxists alarmed Kissinger and Ford as well as many leaders of newly
decolonized African nations in this region such as Tanzania and Zambia, not to
mention the white regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa. Even if the prime
targets of such guerrilla groups were the white-ruled regimes, their spread to
neighboring countries, such as Zambia and Tanzania, could destabilize and even
overthrow such fragile “host” governments. US inaction could cede dominant influence over this
mineral-rich region to the Soviets, suggesting a post-Vietnam loss of national
will.

Beyond classical geopolitics, there
was widespread discussion of a coming “race war” in Southern Africa, especially
in Rhodesia. Apart from alarmist talk in popular circles, the normally sober
diplomat George Kennan raised the specter of “some form of genocide” for whites
and “a cost in bloodshed so appalling as to rock the stability of international
life.”

Along with South Africa and Zaire, the
Americans launched covert military actions to counter the communist presence in
Angola. When news of the US initiative inevitably leaked, the Congress, scarred
by the just-ended Vietnam War, promptly blocked it.

Therefore,
motivated by a combination of Cold War, democratic, and humanitarian interests,
Kissinger switched gears from covert and military to overt and diplomatic. In
effect, he offered a deal to Tanzania, Zambia, and the other “Frontline”
African states that bordered the minority-ruled regimes in the region. If the Frontline states would
keep out foreign troops—Cuban, Soviet, or any other—Kissinger would embark on
an intensive negotiation campaign to achieve black majority rule in Rhodesia.

This was a formidable negotiation
challenge, one that the British had repeatedly failed to meet once Rhodesia had
unilaterally broken away from London, its former colonial master. Here’s why:
in Rhodesia, some 270,000 whites had ruled over six million black Africans. Then-Prime
Minister Ian Smith had confidently asserted: “The white man is master of
Rhodesia. He has built it, and he intends to keep it.” On March 20, 1976, Smith
was categorical: “I don't believe in
black majority rule ever in Rhodesia, not in a thousand years.”

Yet scarcely six months after his
unequivocal declaration, capping Kissinger’s negotiations in the region, Ian
Smith stunned his white countrymen—and a
world audience—with a televised announcement that accepted the principle of
majority rule in Rhodesia, to take effect within two years.

More surprising was how Kissinger had engineered Smith’s
abrupt reversal. He spearheaded a shift in US policy away from quietly backing white
minority governments and toward active support of black majority rule. He
gained British support and delicately worked with leaders of both moderate and
radical black African states. Kissinger ultimately persuaded a reluctant South
Africa—that “citadel of apartheid” and crucial backer of Rhodesia—to apply
powerful pressure to Rhodesia to abandon white minority rule within two years.

Remarkably, South Africa agreed to
coerce its neighbor despite the plain fact
that, if Rhodesia capitulated, anti-apartheid forces would—and later did—shift
their main energies toward South Africa, the major remaining white-ruled state
in the region.

In the course of writing a book that
seeks lessons from Kissinger’s distinctive deal-making career, Nick Burns, Bob Mnookin, and I
have pieced together the twists and turns of this neglected story, which
Kissinger described as “by far the most complex” negotiation he had ever conducted. It involved challenging encounters such as
recruiting a suspicious Julius Nyerere—Tanzanian President and leading figure
in the “non-aligned movement” of developing countries—to help build a
supportive African coalition to pressure the Rhodesians. In his uneasy
alignment with the American Secretary of State, Nyerere wanted “the two
greatest sources of power on our side: God and Kissinger.”

Kissinger’s power in this initiative,
however, did not derive from military or economic sources, though his global
standing was extremely high after his diplomatic successes negotiating the US-China opening, détente and arms control with the Soviets, and
disengagement accords among Egypt, Israel, and Syria after their 1973 war. To
induce South Africa—a vital military backer of Rhodesia and the sole conduit
for much of Rhodesian trade—to pressure its regional ally, Kissinger shrewdly
played on South Africa’s increasingly painful international isolation, its
sanctions-weakened economy, as well as the rapidly mounting costs of its military
operations in the region. Kissinger stressed how playing a visibly constructive
role vis-à-vis Rhodesia promised to improve South Africa’s global image and
reduce its military expenditures.

Perhaps most persuasively, Kissinger
made the case that rapidly increasing guerilla activity
in Rhodesia—where black Africans held a 22-1 edge over whites—would inevitably impose militant
black majority rule on the country. If South Africa pressed Rhodesia now for a
more rapid and peaceful transition to black majority rule, Kissinger argued,
the odds of relatively moderate black leadership (under Joshua Nkomo) were much
higher than if South Africa continued its present course.

At the final stage of this complex multi-party process, with a supportive US-UK-African
coalition and his appeal to a range of South African interests, Kissinger induced John Vorster, South Africa’s Prime
Minister, to compel Rhodesia to accept black majority rule within
two years—or in Ian Smith’s words, to “throw us to the wolves.” Smith lamented
that, at this point, he was “confronted by the one country in the world [South
Africa] that controlled our lifeline . . . leaving us no alternative.”

Barely six months earlier, Rhodesia’s
leader had defiantly declared that black majority rule would not come for “a
thousand years.” Kissinger’s colleague William Schaufele wryly calculated that
the US-led negotiations had “reduced this period…by 98.9 percent.”

For Smith’s Intelligence Chief, Ken
Flower, this reversal “turned the world upside down for most Rhodesians.”
Bishop Abel Muzorewa, a prominent opponent of the white regime, proclaimed that
Smith’s broadcast “electrified the world.” Time magazine’s cover
story on October 11, 1976 lauded Henry Kissinger’s “dazzling diplomatic foray
into Southern Africa” that “raised the possibility that Rhodesia — as well as
much of the rest of southern Africa — might be poised on the brink of peace
instead of a race war that was once thought inevitable.” Global press reaction largely followed suit;
for example, the British Observer
gushed that this intricately choreographed process represented “a staggering
diplomatic coup” in a “seemingly intractable crisis.”

Yet these accolades soon faded from
public consciousness. Though Ian Smith’s about-face proved to be a turning point, black majority
rule in Rhodesia did not actually come on Kissinger’s watch. His Southern
Africa initiative had become a galvanizing issue in the US presidential primaries, inflaming US conservatives such as Ronald Reagan, who accused
him of “preparing a bloodbath in Rhodesia;”
others condemned Kissinger’s “intended betrayal of fellow whites” in Southern
Africa. Soon after Smith’s announcement, a
wounded Gerald Ford lost the 1976 presidential election. Kissinger became a lame duck secretary, effectively ending his role in the
Rhodesia negotiations, which stalled, triggering an upsurge in guerilla
fighting.

Majority rule in Rhodesia only became
a reality with a 1979 agreement that largely followed the Kissinger blueprint,
forged under British leadership at London’s Lancaster House. Against the hopes of South Africa and the
United States for relatively moderate leadership, newly independent Zimbabwe
soon elected Robert Mugabe its
first president. The pride and anticipation that greeted his first term,
however, evolved into despair and resignation as Mugabe’s
lengthy reign turned despotic and economically catastrophic.

It is impossible to forget the
worldwide celebration and 1993 Nobel Prize when Nelson Mandela with F.W. de
Klerk ended apartheid in South Africa and launched black majority rule in that
country. Yet few recall Kissinger’s
remarkable diplomatic push some seventeen years earlier to achieve majority
rule in neighboring Rhodesia.

Perhaps this is because Kissinger did
not finish the job. Perhaps his controversial actions in Cambodia, Chile, and
elsewhere have obscured his Southern Africa negotiations, which for many people
would seem wholly out of character. Certainly, the shadow of Mugabe’s
disastrous reign has eclipsed that long-ago moment of hope when democratic
principle triumphed over white minority rule in Rhodesia.

This mostly forgotten episode
certainly reminds and instructs us about the potential for creative and strategic negotiation to
overcome what many regard as impossibly high barriers. It also underscores how
those on high may soon recant their ironclad declarations. Less than two years
before resigning, Mugabe, like Smith
(“not in a thousand years”) before him, unequivocally proclaimed: “I will be
there until God says come, but as long as [I] am alive I will head the country
. . .”And looking back to history in order to gaze into the future, we see the painful lesson that negotiating
virtuosity plus the election of a charismatic leader hardly suffice for a prosperous and democratic outcome.

James K. Sebenius is a professor at Harvard Business School, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School, and co-author, with Nick Burns and Bob Mnookin, of Kissinger the Negotiator (Harper Collins, forthcoming May 2018).